Ever notice how online we cannot be bothered to type out whole words on the internet? U instead of you, im instead of I’m, are we really that busy that we can’t type out the entire word? I’m guilty of this oh so common way of typing. What makes me actually think about it, is the fact that when I write a paper or a blog, it doesn’t even register to take shortcuts and use shorter versions of the words. Why is it that on the internet talking to our friends, that they deserve anything other than our utmost respect. I guess it is because saying sup is really how we talk when we’re face to face with them. If a professor IMed you online would you talk to them with such casualty?
Recently another form of typing hit the web, 1337, or leet. This is using numbers and other characters as letters. People actually type whole conversations this way. An example would be: |-|3110 |-|0\/\/ 4|23 |_| 2o|4`/. Reading this actually hurts my head, trying to convert it to english, and people use their own forms of typing to come up with their own language, so one leet speak isn’t exactly the same as another leet speak. Why do people feel the need to make up their own alphabet? It started when handles were taken and people had to come up with unique ways of getting the name they wanted, but now they type it as if it was english.
Writing in leet doesn’t make you seem smarter, actually it makes you seem like you have a lot of time on your hands, and if you have that much time, then type out every word you would normally abbreviate in some form. Of course maybe typing with the abbreviated forms of words, or in leet talk is showing that the internet isn’t formal and that what we write online in an email or an IM or even a blog should be considered freedom of speech and not be looked at any other way. Anything that it written online is the soul work of the author and it is their views of the world, and writing like that is how they express themselves, and therefore should not be criticized on how they type, or what they write.
